In this unit,students explore the skills and features of storytelling in narratives focusing on a change. Two essential questions focus their attention on the skills and knowledge presented and assessed in the unit:

How can change be significant?

What makes a good story?

Students answer these questions through the activities and assessments in the unit.

Assessments

Two performance-based tasks, called Embedded Assessments, give students an opportunity to demonstrate their new learning in the skills of writing real and imagined text. Specifically,

Embedded Assessment 1 asks students to write a personal narrative.

Embedded Assessment 2 asks students to write a short story.

In both cases, students demonstrate their ability to organize ideas, develop key concepts, and incorporate narrative elements.

Developing Skills and Knowledge for the Assessments

Throughout the unit, students engage in activities in which they use strategies such as QHT, close reading, marking the text, and adding to practice the important skills of close reading, analyzing narrative elements, and writing real or imagined narratives. Students analyze and discuss a variety of texts such as “Daedalus and Icarus,” a myth from Ancient Greece, as well as Langston Hughes’s short story “Thank You, M’am.” Throughout the unit, discussion, brainstorming, and drafting are promoted as ways to develop ideas about and for narratives.

Students’ vocabulary study concentrates on academic vocabulary such as sequence, cause-effect, and transitions, and vocabulary specific to literary study such as simile, denotation, and point of view.

Helping Your Child

Students should be practicing every day in class for their upcoming performance on the Embedded Assessment. Help your child reflect on and focus his or her learning by asking the following questions:

What did you learn today? What texts did you read, discuss, and respond to in writing or speaking? What strategies did you use during your reading, discussing, and writing?

What did you learn today that will help you succeed on the upcoming Embedded Assessment? What do you still need to practice?

You may also find it helpful to read through the Embedded Assessments (particularly the Scoring Guides) and to note the Learning Targets that are located at the beginning of each activity in the unit.